Neil Richards

Neil Richards is an internationally-recognized expert in privacy law, information law, and freedom of expression. He is a professor of law at Washington University School of Law, a member of the Advisory Board of the Future of Privacy Forum, and a consultant and expert in privacy cases. He graduated in 1997 from the University of Virginia School of Law, and served as a law clerk to Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist. His first book, Intellectual Privacy, was published by Oxford University Press in early 2015.

Professor Richards’ many writings on privacy and civil liberties have appeared in such leading law reviews as the Harvard Law Review, the Columbia Law Review, the Virginia Law Review, and the California Law Review. He has written for a more general audience in Wired Magazine UK, CNN.com, and the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Professor Richards appears frequently in the media, and he is a past winner of the Washington University School of Law's Professor of the Year award. At Washington University, he teaches courses on privacy, free speech, and constitutional law. He was born in England, educated in the United States, and lives with his family in St. Louis. He is an avid cyclist and a lifelong supporter of Liverpool Football Club.

Abstract

In 2003, the international consortium of scientists working on the Human Genome Project completed the final first draft for the human genome - a DNA blueprint for human life. This monumental achievement involved thousands of dedicated people, took more than a decade, and cost over $2.5 billion (£1.95bn). The public availability of a completed human DNA map ushered in the genomics era, giving rise to personalised, or precision, medicine.

It is not often that a legal battle over smartphone firmware captures the national imagination, but such is the case as the FBI tries to access the data contained on suspected San Bernadino shooter Syed Farook’s iPhone. The feds want Apple to help it break into the phone, under the authority of an obscure 1789 law called the All Writs Act. Thus an ancient statute meets an icon of the digital age. This odd pairing is strangely appropriate, as the Apple case, and others like it, will help to determine whether our hard-fought gains in civil liberties will survive today’s technology.

Apple’s celebrated fight with the FBI over the security of its encrypted iPhones has shone the spotlight on an old and obscure federal law from 1789 known as the All Writs Act (AWA).

The AWA is a short little statute, giving federal courts the power to “issue all writs necessary or appropriate in aid of their respective jurisdictions and agreeable to the usages and principles of law.”

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""We can't give the government the power to peer into everybody's digital lives indiscriminately, because that might create a bigger problem than the one we're trying to solve in the first place," said Neil Richards, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis who's an expert in privacy and civil liberties. "The way to do it is if the police suspect a case of distracting driving, they go and they get a warrant and they compel the records from the service provider.""

""It's to the credit of these companies that they have—without admitting it in court—taken the responsibility of the custodians of public debate," said Neil Richards, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis who specializes in the First Amendment. "We have to decide if that's a question we want to have left to a publicly traded corporation.""

""The Supreme Court appropriately understood the importance of the internet to the way politics and free expression occur right now," says Neil Richards, a professor at Washington University Law School, who specializes in First Amendment law. "We cannot have a functioning First Amendment that doesn't take First Amendment activity in a digital context into account.""

"And yet, according to Danielle Citron, author of the book Hate Crimes in Cyberspace, there are 21 crimes that have to do explicitly with speech—things like threats, extortion, aiding and abetting, and conspiracy. None of these types of speech are protected by the First Amendment. “If the First Amendment’s a house, where inside speech is protected, threats can’t walk in the door. Neither can extortion. Neither can solicitation of a crime,” Citron says. In other words, not all speech is covered by the First Amendment's proverbial roof."

""The question of whether the President’s Twitter feed is a public forum is a more complicated question," says Neil Richards, a professor at Washington University's Law school, specializing in First Amendment theory. "The law here is famously muddled, because it’s trying to prevent the government from discriminating against people who speak on public streets and parks, but it’s trying to fight the urge to make everything a public forum.""

Why is it bad when the government or companies monitor our reading or web-surfing? We have intuitions that this kind of surveillance is bad, but have failed to explain why digital monitoring in an age of terror and innovation is really a problem. In Intellectual Privacy, Neil Richards offers a new way of thinking about monitoring of our thinking, reading, and communications, one that ensures that our ideas and values keep pace with our technologies.